When walking through neighbourhoods with beautiful buildings, I often think: "I'd love to see the inside of that flat up there." But you can't get in without asking, you don't know the residents and you're not a guest. Ringing the doorbell to see the flat is also rather unusual in Germany. Even if we've never been in any of these houses, we know hundreds of facades in our favourite neighbourhoods. We don't know anyone who lives there, we've never been there and we'll never move into one of these beautiful flats. What a pity! But we know the façade and use it as a guide.

A small rough calculation: Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin has around 160,000 inhabitants. A block of flats in this district might have fourteen flats. Let's assume that ten people have access to each flat throughout the year. That means residents and guests. So there are 140 different people who see the flats and use the lift throughout the year. Compared to the 160,000 residents of Prenzlauer Berg, this is a clear minority of less than one per thousand. This year there are likely to be significantly fewer.

However, the residents of the neighbourhood are well aware of the façades on the streets, especially if the development is on a corner. Passers-by from four directions meet here, and the façade across the intersection also has more space to be seen. Restaurants and bars do better because they are recognised from afar. Let's hope they are allowed to reopen soon.

So the architect who works on the façade reaches a much larger audience than the colleague who only scrubs at the floor plans. Good floor plans are very important, no question about it, but the last 150 years have shown that they are constantly changing with use: an opening here, a drywall wall there. Changes of use are part of city life. The facades stay the same while residents move in and out, bars open and close, doctors' surgeries are handed over and so on.

A prominent façade can easily reach over 150,000 viewers - a good floor plan perhaps 200, which is why the façade is also a cultural product for the community. It provides recognition and orientation in the hustle and bustle of the city. As far as the façade is concerned, we are all communists. The outer walls of the houses are the inner walls of the city. If architecture stands outside the city, it can be designed from the volume. There is no urban space and the building can look like a sculpture. Almost always a hit against a beautiful backdrop. But wherever there is a black plan of the city, I think a façade is needed that forms the inner wall of the urban space. Then it becomes clear, for example, why not every colour of a fan is suitable as a façade colour. Then it also becomes clear why 180 square metres of unstructured wall look bare and dreary. Then it also becomes clear why all-glass façades do not adequately delimit the urban space: Our gaze is like a bird that we send out into the distance. It doesn't recognise the obstacle and crashes into it.

But in our degree programme, the facades were what you did at the end. Woe betide anyone who first hung a façade on the wall and then thought about floor plans. Shame and disgrace in front of the whole semester! "Designing a house from the outside in" was considered very superficial and unrefined. "Designing like Walt Disney" was a typical insult. Today, after a hundred years of curtain walls, our cities are quite shaken. Although modernism set out to derive everything from function, our façades look strangely arbitrary, as fashionable as the pattern on grandma's curtains, as cool as sunglasses, as entertaining as leisure shirts. The façade has become a disposable item that unfortunately cannot be quietly slipped into the bedside cabinet or the carnival chute. It has to be measured by transmission values and transmission coefficients. There must be an A+++ sticker somewhere on the façade. If it's as ugly as a washing machine, then so be it.

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First published on Facebook on 24 January 2021